Measles is a highly contagious, airborne illness, commonly associated with a red rash, fever, eye infection, and cough.  However, it can cause life-threatening illnesses.  The measles virus can attack adults as well as children. . During an outbreak, about 1 in 5 who get sick will need hospital care, and 1 in 20 will develop pneumonia.  Measles may lead to cardiac problems or swelling of the brain and death.

By the fall of 2019, the MMRV vaccination rate had plummeted to 31% and over 5,000 Samoans were stricken by the resultant measles outbreak, which had been predicted by many public health officials. Of the 83 deaths in the country, 79 of them were children under age 15. In the midst of that epidemic, RFK Jr. wrote the prime minister and suggested that the vaccine itself may have been the cause.

That MAGA-addled a$$hat is neither qualified nor fit to organize a one-float Rose Parade, never mind overseeing and running the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services.

Auto tycoon Henry Ford - hardly a "woke" liberal - had earlier visited Washington D.C. to personally lobby President Herbert Hoover to veto the bill, bluntly telling him that the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were "an economic stupidity." Hoover, having earlier pledged in his 1928 campaign to expand our country's international cooperation with other nations around the world, initially agreed with him and called the measure "vicious, extortionate, and obnoxious."

However, the president soon found it difficult to ignore the political pressures coming from his own Republican Party. With GOP members in both chambers of Congress in unanimous support of the Smoot-Hawley bill and two-thirds of his own cabinet threatening to resign if he vetoed the bill, Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley bill into law on June 17, 1930, raising US tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods.

Sen. Smoot and Rep. Hawley had assured Hoover that the tariffs would protect and encourage then-declining U.S. agricultural production, ignoring the fact that upwards of 25% of U.S. farmland had heretofore been devoted to the production of feed for the horses and mules which were no longer being needed to plow the fields and draw the wagons that had been hauling goods to market.

It's as though Republicans were oblivious to the revolution that had occurred in transportation over the previous 30-40 years, i.e.., the introduction of automobiles, trucks, and tractors that had rendered horse- and mule-drawn vehicles and equipment obsolete, freeing up that aforementioned farmland to be converted to the production of other cash crops. But that conversion was then only just beginning. Meanwhile, the enormous growth in manufacturing in the wake of the First World War had created huge U.S. trade surpluses with other countries, which dwarfed our deficit in agricultural exports.

The Smoot-Hawley Act quickly sparked a ruinous global trade war that resulted in an almost immediate decline of worldwide trade by some 60-66%, as other countries quickly retaliated against the U.S. tariffs by erecting their own barriers to imported goods from not just the United States but also other countries as well.

As a direct result, the international credit market quickly dried up, banks in the U.S. and Europe teetered on the brink of insolvency, the U.S. gross national product was reduced by 47%, our unemployment rate tripled from 8% to 25% in less than 24 months, and what had been a national economic recession triggered by the New York Stock Market Crash of 1929 - which that stock market had already recovered from - soon ballooned into the worldwide economic collapse known today as the Great Depression.

Two years after Hoover had signed Sen. Smoot's and Rep. Hawley's bill into law, with the U.S. economy in free fall, all three men were soundly beaten in the 1932 election, alongside 12 other Senate Republicans and 102 GOP House members. On March 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the oath of office as president and, in partnership with a new Democratic-controlled Congress, immediately implemented a series of executive actions and introduced a package of legislative measures that amounted to economic triage for a wounded nation in crisis.

The late philosopher George Santayana once counseled us that those who fail to remember the past are condemned to repeat it. That's cold comfort for those of us who do remember, but who are effectively captive to current events inside Washington, D.C., with a malevolent clown car known as the second Trump administration now on a joyride.